Ripples on the brain

First of all I’m neither against reservation, not against women, nor am I against any particular caste. For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to understand this whole concept of reservation against the backdrop of the widely reported events in the country and my experiences. Obviously, I haven’t done a lot of analysis on the subject, so the post might be very amateurish.

The OBC reservation issue

My Social Studies teacher in school presented the best reason I’ve heard thus far for reservation based on community/caste. A handicapped child should not compete with a normal child in similar terms. A perfect reasoning that I hold on to even today. There have been some people who have not been given the opportunity to educate themselves because of their caste for generations. Hence, it is completely possible that their offspring in the current generation will find it that much more difficult to perform due to several factors – hereditary, lack of parental help at home etc., other than of course the financial reasons.

Sometime early this year, when AIIMS was involved in violent agitation against reservation, the Prime Minister assured them that their demands will be looked into and the Supreme Court, citing PM’s assurance stated that since the PM has agreed to come up with a committee to review the proposed policy, they must return to work. The Hindu, in its editorial argued that the striking doctors were no longer justified in continuing their strike in the light of these assurances.

After the issue cooled down, the government did appoint a committee under Mr. Veerappa Moily. However, instead of reviewing the reservation policy, the committee came up with plans to implement the reservation policy. Till date, as a common man, I haven’t seen any empirical evidence from the government for the need for reservation for the OBC’s (like they being completely under-represented), any evidence on the success of the reservation policies currently in place (like the positive changes in the number of students of particular castes graduating) or any logic that justifies the number 27% (the need could even be more than 27%). The useless HRD minister Arjun Singh’s appeared completely clueless in this interview when Karan Thapar provided him with facts and figures. After initially trying to be a lone crusader for OBC reservation and drawing flak from all and sundry, he tried to completely shift the blame to the Parliament in the interview.

Now why is an empirical, numerical data important to arrive at a proper reservation policy? I’ll answer this question with an example. For a few days, I had an opportunity to commute by the local trains in Chennai. I noticed that both during the busy office hours in the morning and in the evening, there were many coaches that were marked as “Ladies Compartments”. I believe that this is a perfect solution to enable ladies to travel comfortably in a train. But, what is the right number of compartments to be reserved? In fact, I noticed that during the peak hours, the normal coaches (sometimes even the first class ones) were overflowing with people literally having enough space to just plant one foot. At the same time, each ladies compartment had 4-5 women (full capacity should be greater than 72)! Now with so much space to themselves, the ladies exhibited a peculiar behavior. They no longer sat in any of the seats (when they had the luxury to spread their arms and legs), but stood near the entrances of the compartments. Try to calculate the wastage of resources (here, seats) assuming around 25 ladies occupied the 4 ladies compartments, when they could have occupied just one instead and left the rest as general compartments.

This is the kind of resource wastage we are looking at if reservations are done without proper analysis and figures (In the above case, the solution could range from having ladies bays/coupes instead of compartments or changing the number of reserved compartments depending on the timing). Though, the government plans to increase the number of seats in institutions of higher learning, it is common knowledge that the capacity can never be more than the demand. With limited capacity when compared to the demand, reservation should be an optimization formula that takes care of the interests of the downtrodden while minimizing resource wastage/quality reduction/rejection of the deserving. While everybody understands that implementation of a reservation policy accurately is very difficult, the reservation policy itself cannot be inaccurate/deliberately approximate.

Reservation for women

I have nothing more to add to the above topic, so let me take up the topic of reservation for women. I still am unable to figure out a reason for reservation for women. It is true that women weren’t presented with the same opportunities as men and in some cases were oppressed. But a reservation policy cannot be atonement for the past misdeeds of the society. Shouldn’t just changing the outlook of the society, creating more awareness, having social incentives/disincentives tackle this problem? The same logic as above cannot be applied to women as women do not constitute a single community. I don’t see them having any specific disadvantage/handicap when competing with men (except in physically strenuous activities). If they have handicaps similar to those listed above viz. lack of parental support in academics etc. that should be taken care by the caste-based reservation itself.

I have been witness to several “informal”, off-the-book (and what I consider unfair) reservation policies followed by the several institutions. One of my alma-maters admitted several undeserving women students just to improve its global image despite the fact that it was obvious to everyone that they didn’t make the cut. This is not limited to educational institutions alone. One of my current colleagues, who did his MBA from one of the top-most (government-aided will be an additional clue) B-schools pointed out that several investment bankers offered jobs to girl students just based on their gender. In my institute, a famous IT company came up with a single criterion for short-lists for the interview – girls. In fact many girls themselves questioned and deplored this act of the company during their interviews.

I think all the cases pointed out above were unfair simply because they definitely reduced the quality and denied the opportunity to at least one deserving candidate.

But by far the most poignant example is the following. When I was in Hyderabad, I had an opportunity to visit a corporation school to profile the girl students for a scholarship that an NGO for women was planning to give them. We needed to collect a lot of information (personal, family etc.) from each of the girl child in that school. Only when we turned up at the school, did we realize that it was co-education school. The NGO also provided us with a box of chocolate bars asking us to give a bar to a girl child after getting information from her. While we embarked on this, the boys in the school obviously were piqued as to why the girls alone were being interviewed. When they learnt that chocolate bars also were distributed (we didn’t distribute it in front of them, they obviously learnt about it from their friends), one of the guys (probably 9-10 years old) approached me with a question to which I had no answer: “Why am I not getting any chocolate?”. Every male child in school today is witness to at least one such situation where his girl class mate is getting a concession/priority over him. His perception of the other gender is being set based on such experiences.

Summary

Stopping discrimination against one community shouldn’t mean discriminating against the other community.
I repeat, reservation can never be a way to atone for the past misdeeds of a society.
Reservation cannot be a subjective decision of a few individuals simply because of the stakes involved.

Thanks to the way the policies are being implemented today and the politics that is involved, reservation will ensure cyclic discrimination of communities and will become a perpetual tool for the politicians.